This was a peculiarly hard lot. The real sorrow of war, like those of drunkenness, always fall most heavily upon women. They may not bear arms. They may not even share the triumphs which compensate their brethren for toil and suffering danger. They must sit still and endure. The poverty which war brings to them wears no cheerful face, bit sits down with them to empty tables and pinches them sorely in solitude. After the victory, the men who have won it throw up their hats in a glad huzza, while their wives and daughters await in sorest agony of suspense the news which may bring hopeless desolation to their hearts. To them the vicrory may mean the loss of those for whom they lived and in whom they hoped, while thos who have fought the battle it brings only gladness. And all of this was true of Southern women almost without exception. The fact that all the men capable of bearing arms went into the army, and stayed there, gave to every woman in the South a personal interest not only in the general result of each battle, but in the list of killed and wounded as well. Poverty, too, and privation of the sorest kind, was the common lot, while the absence of the men laid down the heavy burdens of work and responsibility upon shoulders unused to either. But they bore it all, not cheerfully only, but gladly. They believed it to be the duty of every able-bodied man to serve in the army, and they eagerly sent the men of their own homes to the field, frowning undisguisedly upon every laggard until there were no laggards left. And their spirit knew no change as the war went on. Their idea of men's duty comprehended nothing less than persistence as long as a shot could be fired. When they saw that the end was not to be victory, but defeat, that fact made no change, whaever in their view of the duty to be done. Still less did their own privations, labors and sufferings tend to dampen their ardor. On the contrary, the more heavily the war bore upon themselves, the more persistently did they demand that ir should be fought out to the end. When they lost a husband, son or brother, they held the loss as only an additional reason for faithful adherance to the cause. Having made such a sacrifice to that which was almost a religion to them, they had, if possible, less thought than ever of proving unfaithful to it.


I put these general statements first, so that the reader who shall be interested in such anecdotes as I shall have to tell may not be misled thereby into the thought that these good women were implacable or vindictive, when they were only devoted to a cause which in their eyes represented the sum of all righteousness.


I remember a conversation between two of them, - one a young wife whos husband was in the army, and the other an elderly lady, with no husband or son, but with many friends and near relatives in marching regiments. The younger lady remarked, - "I'm sure I do not hate our enemies. I earnestly hope their souls may go to heaven, but I would like to blow all their mortal bodies away, as fast as they come upon our soil."


"Why you shocked me my dear,"replied the other. "I don't see why you want the Yankees to go to heaven. I hope to get there myself someday, and I'm sure I shouldn't want to go if I thought I should find any of them there.
The old lady ws convinced from the first that the South would fail, and she based this belief upon the fact that we had permitted the Yankees to build railroads through the Southern States. "I tell you," she would say, "that's what they built the railroads for. They knew the war was coming, and they got ready for it. The railroad will whip us, you may depend on it. What else were they made for? We got along well enough without them, and we oughtn't to have let anybody build them." And no amount of reasoning would shake her conviction that the people of the North had built all our railroads with treacherous intent, though the stock of the only railroad she had ever seen was held very largely by the people along its line, many of whom were her own friends.


She always insisted, too, that the Northern troops came South and made war tor the sole purpose of taking possession of our lands and negroes. And she was astonished almost out of her wits when she learned that the negoroes were free. She had supposed that they were simple to change masters. And even then she lived for months in daily anticipation of the coming of "the new land owners," who were waiting, she supposed, for assignments of plantations to be made to them by military authority.


"They'll quarrel about the division, maybe," she said one day, "and then there'll be a chance for us to whip them again, I hope." The last time I saw her, whe had not yet become convinced that title-deeds were still to be respected. A young girl of a very gentle dispostion, astonished a Federal colonel one day by an outburst of temper which served at least to show the earnestness of her purpose to uphold the her side of the argument. She lived in a part of the country then for the first time held by the Federal army, and a colonel, with some members of his staff, made her family the unwilling recipients of a call one morning. Seeing the piano open, the colonel asked the young lady to play, but she declined. He then went to the instrument himself, but he had hardly begun to play when the damsel, raising the piano top, severed nearly all the strings with a hatchet, saying to the astonished performer, as she did so, - "That's my piano, and it shall not give you a minute's pleasure." The colonel bowed, apologized and replied, - "If all your people are as ready as you to make costly sacrifices, we might as well go home."

And most of them were ready to make similar sacrifices. One lady of my acquaintance knocked in the heads of a dozen casks of choice wine rather than allow some Federal officers to sip as many glasses of it. Another destroyed her own library, which was very precious to her, when that seemed the only way in which she could prevent the staff of a general officer, camped near her, from enjoying a few hours' reading in her parlor every morning.

In New Orleans, soon after the war, I saw in a drawing room, one day, an elaborately framed letter of which, the curtains being drawn, I could read only the signature, which to my astonishment was that of General Butler.
"What is that?" I asked of the gentle woman I was visiting.
Oh, that's my certificate of good behavior, from General Butler:" and taking it down from the wall, she permitted me to read it, telling me at the same time its history. It seems that the young lady had been very active ing aiding captured Confederates to escape from New Orleans, and for this and other similar offenses she was arrested several times. A gentleman who knew General Butler personally had interested himself in behalf of her and some of her friends, and upon making an appeal for their discharge received this personal note from the commanding general, in which he declared his willingness to discharge all the others, "But that black-eyed Miss B., " he wrote, "seems to me an incorrigible little devil whom even prison fare won't tame." The young lady had framed the note, and she cherishes it yet, doubtless. (To be continued.)